Welcome to the Hellgate
by Nadie2
Summary: While visiting her California family Sam discovers a natural wormhole, or hellmouth as the locals call it. The Scobbies and SG-1 work together to combat your regular everyday apocalypse. And Spike develops a taste for blood with naquada.
1. Chapter 1

Sometimes, mostly when she was nearly dying off world, Samantha Carter couldn't help but wonder if she wasn't missing something by never having done something truly domestic with her life. She ought to have gotten married and made lots of babies and cookies. Or something. To be honest, her ideas of domesticity weren't that firmly developed.

Then there were other days, days where she sat in the living room with her brother's family, that she felt she had made the correct life choice.

Family was terribly boring, was it not? I mean, the kids ripped open the presents that she had gotten them in minutes, and then complained about being bored. Mostly they made nuisances of themselves until you set them in front of some screen or another at which time they became absolute zombies.

She supposed they were spoiled, and she'd like to think that _her_ children if she were ever to have them would never do such horrible things! But she knew the truth. She was likely to put a great deal less effort into child raising than her brother had, and her children were no doubt bound to turn out a whole lot worse than his were doing, no matter who she managed to get to contribute the other half of their genome.

She flipped open the paper completely out of boredom. The last time she'd read an honest to goodness ink and paper newspaper she'd been a sophomore in high school and had been offered extra credit for every error she found. It was a small town newspaper who got names and grammar muddled almost as often as it got it right, so the pickings had been very easy. She'd needed the extra credit, to be honest, because as skilled as she was at all things scientific she knew nothing (nor cared nothing) for gerunds or the other evil bits of grammar that start popping up in English by the time you reach high school.

This paper however, was not nearly as humdrum as the paper had been in that little town in Ohio. There wasn't even a "Neighborhood Happenings" section which reported who had gone "a-visiting" at whose house.

You would think someone like Samantha Carter couldn't be surprised by much, but you'd be wrong.

A giant serpent bringing fire from the sky and destroying a high school? It sounded like the poetic interpretation of a Goau'ld visitation that Daniel might read on the wall of a cave. There couldn't be Goa'uld in California though, could there? I mean, someone at Stargate command would have known if there were Goa'uld at…what was the name of the town? Oh yeah, Sunnydale.

-0-

As Buffy runs through the very familiar martial arts moves in her backyard, she can't help but think about the recent events, and how badly she had messed them up. She couldn't really blame herself though. Buffy hadn't prepared for a media presence after the whole incident at graduation. It wasn't like the media had ever been very interested in the happenings on the Helmouth. If Giles was there he no doubt would have said something clever that would have made them go away.

Buffy wasn't really clever. She wasn't sure she was really a whole lot of anything expect that which came by the gifts of the slayer. Sometimes she wondered what her life would have been if she wasn't chosen.

Normal probably. Average, maybe even a bit below average.

That would be nice.

A woman with short blond hair pulls up in a black car, and stares at Buffy behind dark sunglasses.

"Were you at the high school during the unfortunate incident?" the woman asks.

"I'm not going to do any more interviews," Buffy responds. She figures she's already done enough damage with that during the stunned interview that she felt had been ripped out of her as she panted for breath after saving the world.

Again.

"I'm not with the media," the woman says, pushing the glasses up on top of her head, and revealing brilliant blue eyes. "I'm actually with the Air Force."

"Ah, so this is a Men in Black thing?"

"Not exactly," the woman says, pinching her mouth together to keep herself from laughing. It looks like she has had a lot of practice doing that.

"That's good, because aliens," Buffy raises her eyebrows. "That's pretty out there."

The woman's mouth pinches in her 'I'm not going to laugh' face once more before she says, "Well, giant snakes starting buildings on fire, that's a bit out there as well."

"Listen, there was some accident at my high school graduation, I said something weird after almost dying, and some crazy newspaper reporter went and turned it into something sensational. It's definitely not anything that the United States Air Force would need to concern itself with."

The woman leans against her car with a slight smile on her face. "Still, if you're going to mutter something in delirium why would it be about giant snakes? It's a little bit random, don't you think?"

Buffy's stomach turns with the thought that they might know _she_ had something to do with it all. For all she knew, this was their slightly roundabout way of charging her for blowing up the school.

Which she had done, technically. She didn't like to play the _but I'm the slayer, the rules don't apply to me_ card, but if ever there was a time for it now would be it. Then again, you just can't go around admitting to the government that your favorite after school activity is fighting supernatural beings. Mostly because you won't be believed.

"Do you mind if I come in and have a chat?" the woman asks.

"No problem," Buffy says with false easiness after doing a mental check to make sure that there was nothing supernatural in her living room, "I'll just call Giles."

"You've had a lot of cause for a lawyer at your age?"

"He's not my lawyer, he's my librarian," Buffy replies, shooting the older woman a look of reproach.

-0-

Sam sits down on a couch in the middle of suburbia while a perky blond teenager goes to call up her school librarian on the phone. In many ways this scene is just as normal as the one she left behind at her brother's house. She's not fooled though. She wakes up in a house just as normal as this, before taking a morning run in a neighborhood that you would have to admit was completely typical, and then sipping her something super girly and mildly seasonal latte.

She did the normal thing, and then she went out and kicked alien butts.

Yeah, Samantha thought to herself, she herself wasn't quite as perky as the teenager, but she was blond, and she was pretty sure that whatever the secret the teenager and the librarian had together it was going to be just as weird as her own secret.

The teenager comes in looking more worried and confused then before, and sits down on a chair. She smiles at the woman across from her, and then sits on her hands.

"I'm sorry, I don't think I introduced myself, Colonel Samantha Carter," Sam says, extending her hand.

"Buffy," Buffy says, even more unnerved by the title before the woman's name.

"I'm just interested in your eye witness account," Sam cajoles, knowing that she has got to use the time before the librarian arrives to the best of her ability since he was able to quiet Buffy so effectively with just a phone call.

"We were graduating, and then there was the explosion," Buffy says with a shrug. "Like I said, I was pretty out of it at the time. I'm probably not the one you should ask." Then suddenly the teenagers eyes bulged, probably with the realization that whoever Sam decided to ask besides her would be far less able to deal with the selective release of information than she herself was. "You know what, it's really not worth your time to ask anyone. It was a little thing. Small potatoes."

Sam nods her head as if believing her, but inside her heart is leaping for joy that small town America is shaping up to be this interesting. She shouldn't be this excited by civilians in danger but…it would be hard to do her job if danger didn't excite her, and her job certainly needed to be done.

Just then a man runs into the room and says, "Buffy! We've got to go." The teenager runs out of the room with him without another thought, but the librarian turns back to her with a quick, "I'm sorry the interview will have to be canceled, she's late for her piano lesson."

The excuse is ridiculous, and was perhaps meant to be so. It was obvious to Sam that she is being brushed off, but that doesn't deter her at all. She waits until they think that they have enough lead on her that she will never be able to follow, and then she gets in her car and trails them.

-0-

"What kind of demon is it?" Buffy asks, standing at the thing before her. It's roughly hominid, to be sure. Her brief run-ins with it already has proven to Buffy that it is a lot stronger than the average human. It also has something on its arm that shoots out…it was a little hard to describe, but it can knock a slayer on her ass. Then there was the glowy-eye thing. That was new.

"I haven't the faintest." It isn't a surprise from Giles. It's a familiar pattern to her by now, and it doesn't scare her when he's clueless like it did when she first came to Sunnydale. It goes like this…They see something terrifying. Giles doesn't know what it is. Then Giles forces them to read books all night. Then he figures out what it is, and tells Buffy how she can kill it.

"Time for the retreat then," Buffy says, taking a few steps back as she says the words.

"Sha're?" a woman's voice says in question. Buffy turns to see the woman who was interviewing her before standing in front of the demon creature, standing in front of him like she knew what she was doing, and didn't fear her.

"Amaunet, actually, and this little girl thinks that I am a demon," the monster laughs over her and Giles to the woman before him.

"Come now, it can't be the first time someone has made that mistake," the woman shoots back like they are old friends bantering. Only one of them had just been seen by Giles pillaging the mayor's house and snapping the neck of a servant who tried to stop him. Maybe the woman who interviewed her was on the side of the beast who had just committed murder. Maybe all of those questions hadn't been trying to get her to admit that she had set fire to the school, but were actually trying to get information for a world take over, or who knows what else!

She had just had an interview with a demon, and hadn't even noticed, her radar must really be off.

"Oh Samantha, how I will enjoy killing you, again and again, and again," the demon with the curly brown hair announces, advancing toward her with the weapon that could knock a slayer on her ass raised and ready.


	2. Chapter 2

"Cool, a spaceship!" Spike says. He doesn't question why there is a spaceship sitting in a field outside of Sunnydale. Honestly, it's not even close to the weirdest thing he's seen round here.

He just climbs in and tries to fly it. He ends up crashing. It's hard to tell if it was because he had no idea how to use the controls, or if it was because he was drunk.

Either way, he just decided to crawl into the back and sleep it off. There was something soft back there. It might have been a bean bag or it might have been a small bed, it was pretty hard to tell, not that he even bothered to think about it.

Spike is having a dream about flying. He's never felt this free. The first time he got in a car it felt like this. Like a superhero getting his wings.

Then he smells something-human. They are dead. Dead people don't smell. Well, the recently dead ones do, but they smell like either blood or decay. This was the smell of someone alive.

He sits up and realizes the dream about flying might have had some truth to it. It takes his hung over stomach for a loop de loop.

Then he sees the source of the human-y smell. She's driving the ship. He staggers into the seat right next to her. She glances at him once, without really realizing what she is looking at. Then she gives out a scream.

The spaceship crashes again.

The human glances at him after the crash, "Of course, we're okay, because there is nothing in the whole of the universe more crash proof than a Avia vessel."

"Is that what we are in right now?" Spike asks, a bit disoriented by the crash even though he is unhurt just as the woman said he was.

"Stupid earthlings. Of course you wouldn't know what kind of a ship you'd gotten into. I just don't quite understand how you got into it in the first place, and once you did why you would choose to scare the living daylights out of the pilot."

Living. She was that. And there was leather, and a very biteable neck. If he bites her, then he would obviously have the whole of the spaceship to himself. He would also have blood in his mouth, and that alone was always reason enough to do anything.

"Are you listening?" she asks, putting that pulsating wrist on her hip. He hasn't been, but he nodded his head. "Honestly, men!" she exclaims. She has a lovely accent. It's a bit hard for him to place. Not British exactly, but some part of the commonwealth to be sure. "Why are you in my spaceship?" she demands, her words finally getting loud enough that they drown out the pulsing of her veins.

"I didn't know it was your spaceship," he says, knowing that that is a pretty poor excuse.

"So you just think you can walk up and take things that don't belong to you?" she demands. He is about to break out his fangs, and explain to her exactly _why_ he thinks that when she shrugs and says "I suppose that's fair. I stole it."

"Well I stole it first!" Spike says.

The woman laughs. "Only if you happened to be on the moon of Gilbens four months back, and I really doubt that I would have not noticed you for that long."

"The moon?" Spike says.

"I forget that your planet's beings are all prudes about space travel."

"Prudes? It's just that we can't do it."

"Primitives, then."

The urge to bite her is too strong, and he gives in. Her blood is different than anything he's ever tasted before. He likes it.

"Who thought I would have met a think kinkier than me!" she exclaims pulling him up to turn a the bite into a kiss.

He bites her tongue inside her mouth, and that blood tastes like electricity to him too.

She's walking him slowly, each step causing her knee to come into contact with his rising manhood.

Then a shove, and he's on the ground watching her take off.

He's got to taste that blood again. It's like electricity running through his body.

-0-

"You pitiful little humans," the creature says, taking a step toward Sam. Sam doesn't take a step back, as was obviously the intent of the advance, but just holds her ground unwavering. Buffy has fought demons for most of her life, and she would still have the urge to step back with that monster advancing on her.

"How did you get here? The iris is sealed, and we would have detected a ship," Sam says.

The woman smiles. "You would not have detected any ship that I would have flown, but there are many ways for a Goa'uld to travel." Sam has a suspicion of what the woman means. She can't put it into words, mostly because the whole idea is so utterly terrifying to her, but she has felt it ever since she first arrived at this place.

It has a pull you know. A pull like when you are going through the Stargate. Not naquada exactly, …but…something.

"What could you possibly want?" Sam demands.

"Oh, the usual," the Goa'uld says with casualness which is not all false. Then her voice turns deep again as she says, "For every creature in the universe to bow to my will, and worship me as Goddess."

"That's intense," Buffy mutters to Giles. He doesn't say anything back, just stars at the female demon as he riffles through a mental file-oh-fax trying to place her, as well as whatever woman stands up to the demon with courage like that. There can only be one Slayer at a time, right?

"This is Daniel's planet, and he wants you to return to him," Sam says, staring at the woman.

"I shall enjoy watching this planet burn," the monster says with deep voice, and then it looks as if she passed out. No, it's more violent than that, it looks as if it were a brief head bobbing seizure. Then a voice so different from the one that has talked so far screams out the word, "Dan'el!" with agony which can pierce the heart of even the least empathetic of observers.

"Sha're!" Sam says then, actually taking a few steps toward the woman.

"Amaunet, I just can't understand why you keep getting that wrong," the deeper voice says. She holds up her arm ready to activate that slayer-on-her-ass tool that she keeps there.

That's when the spaceships crashes between them, and a brunette comes out cursing, and then saying," Just because you are crash proof doesn't mean that you have to keep crashing every five seconds."

An Avia is a big upgrade from a natural wormhole. So the Goa'uld uses the armband to knock Vala down, and then she just walks up into the space ship like it belongs to her, because it does. Everything belongs to the queen.

That leaves four people. A space pirate now stranded on Earth, a Major in the United States who held the honor of being the human who had spent the third most time on other planets in the entire world, a slayer, and her watcher.

It's Giles who breaks the silence first, "I think maybe you should all come with us, and have a spot of tea," he says as he cleans his glasses.

-0-

No one says anything until the tea has been dispersed. It's only when the only way to avoid actually drinking the stuff is to talk that the words start flowing out of people's mouths.

"I take it that you have battled whatever kind of demon that was before," Giles says to the Major.

"She wasn't a demon, love, she was a goddess. I should know, I used to be one myself," Vala states with a proud hair flip.

"Not a goddess, she just poses as one. But you used to be a Goa'uld host?" Sam asks with excitement. At Vala's nod Sam says, "Hey, me too!"

"Well, I'm so glad we are having the 'I used to be a demon' reunion here, but I think we need to focus on how we are going to stop the crazy chick with magic wrists," Buffy says.

"Why do you keep saying demon? Laws, your society is primitive," Vala says, leaning back with a roll of her eyes.

"That might be, but we're not quite familiar with this sort of thing," Giles says, bristling at the idea of him against the accusation of not being civilized (quite offensive, he thought, to a member of the group of people who brought civilization to the rest of the world) with the careful cleaning of his glasses.

"What he means is, how do you know she isn't a demon? I know that the Supernatural can be a bit shocking at first, but we have a lot of experience working with it, and I have to tell you, that there are a lot of things which you never thought were true that totally are," Buffy says.

Vala rolls her eyes again, "Look, don't feel bad about it. Young civilizations get this wrong all the time. You're actually ahead of the curve, because you call him a demon instead of a god. Good for you. In a few thousand years your people will probably invent science, and then if someone takes pity on you they might explain to you what that thing really is."

"We've already invented science, and there are a lot of people on the planet who do know the truth about what that creature is. We just try to keep it quiet to avoid terrifying the masses."

"Well, I'm already bloody terrified," Giles says.

"Not me, I've fought worse," the teenager says cheerfully.

"She's an alien," Vala says.

Giles and Buffy both glance at each other before they laugh hysterically.

"No really. She was born on another planet." Sam defends the statement, thinking that it might have more weight coming from a respected member of the armed forces. She was wrong of course. It just caused another fit of laughter.

"I was too!" Vala says, hands on hips, offended by their xenophobia.

More laughter.

"She was a good person, actually the wife of a friend of mine. Then she had a worm-like parasite wrapped around her brain stem, and it caused her to dramatically change her behavior."

Suddenly the laughter stops, at least from Giles.

"Snakes in creatures who fell from the skies, and practiced mind control on whoever they could find?" Giles mutters to himself. "I seem to remember something about it." He looks off into the distance for a long time before he mutters. "Gouds?"

"Goa'uld," Vala corrects, with the air of a teacher who has at long last made a very dense pupil understand something, pride and condescension all mixed together.

"How do we stop her?" Buffy asks, crossing her arms.

"I don't know that we can. She's a goddess," Vala says.

"I like vampires better. All you have to do is just put a stake through their heart," Buffy mutters.

Now it is Sam's turn to giggle at the idea of a vampire.

Giles shoots her a quick look of reproach while saying, "I assure you that vampires are quite real."

"Oh yeah, I've seen them myself. They can suck the life right out of you with their hand," Vala says, holding out her hand by way of demonstration.

"Actually, they suck the blood out of you with their teeth," Giles says, taking a sip of tea in smug condescension.

"Hey, it doesn't really matter, because the big bad isn't a vampire right now, is it?" Buffy asks.

"No," Vala agrees, all the while glaring at the British man who dared to contradict her.

"So how do we kill it?" Buffy asks. Vala starts to open her mouth again, no doubt in an attempt to assert that the task she set before them is impossible. Buffy continues, "Come on, you guys were both brainwashed by this thing, and you beat it. So tell me what we are going to do."

Sam looks down for a long minute before looking up, and meeting the rest of the group in the eyes one by one, says, "I can't really take credit for my freedom from it. A Tok'ra gave it's life to save me."

"Really? The Tok'ra saved me too," Vala says, brightening up at the mysterious word.

"Okay, then do we have the spell to summon the Tok'ra?" Giles asks.

"Spell?" the two former hosts reply in confusion.

"Phone number?" Buffy suggests hopefully.


	3. Chapter 3

People said that the Ancients invented wormhole travel. That wasn't even close to true. You could say that they discovered wormhole travel, but even that is a bit of a stretch. Every civilization starts with religion and magic and science all mixed together. It takes generations and a great deal of work to separate the three out. Back when they were tangled for the Ancients, it was not unusual to fall into a natural wormhole. It still happens now and again, across the universe, but almost all of the natural wormholes had been harnessed to make the Stargate system.

Hell mouth. Natural wormhole. It was just a difference in translations.

You couldn't be sure where you would end up when you jumped into a natural wormhole. Another planet? Maybe. Another time? Possible. Another dimension in a world that looked a great deal just like your world, but not enough that you could feel comfortable. Sure.

That was the hell part of the hell mouth. You don't quite know what was going to happen.

Had Amounet meant to come to the planet that her host's husband was from? No, she had not. She had been aiming for a fresh new planet untouched by the Goa'uld.

She didn't know that they were going to be one and the same.

If she had, she never would have come, because after all, she was not the strongest of symbionts. Her host had taken her over before, hidden secrets in her heart for weeks on end, and if Amounet was being completely honest, there were parts of her host's mind that were probably unexamined as of yet.

Most of the time, she was only able to win the constant struggle by showing her host things so horrible that the young woman would curl up inside her.

Ever since she'd arrived in this place the voice inside her had been running a dialogue, and she hadn't known why until the golden haired one had explained it to her.

Now, the voice within her would not still. He was here. The love of her life. He was here, and she must fly to him.

Amounet didn't even realize that she was obeying the inside voice until she saw the strange circular fields beneath them.

The host's heart was singing with joy. She didn't know that her husband was from a desert. The rest of Earth had been very different from this, but this was something she was familiar with.

The host wanted to live with them forever.

Amounet is tempted to agree. After all, forever for these humans is no more than a blink in the eye of a Goa'uld. What if she struck a deal with this woman? Agreed that for the lifetime of this fly, this human, she would live on this planet. Then the host would submit for the rest of her life, and travel the galaxy with her symbiot without any objection.

If only, she could trust the woman to keep her word.

-0-

Walter isn't following proper protocol when he bursts into the General's office, but General Hammond doesn't rebuke him. George knows that Walter is wise enough that if he interrupts an important phone call he has a damned good reason.

"Sir, NORAD has detected a spaceship flying over Colorado!" the younger man explains.

"What! Is it Goa'uld?" The General says, rising from his seat and dropping the phone, not even remembering what is in his hand.

"No, Sir," Walter replies.

"Is it Earth based?"

"It does not appear so," Walter says.

The General takes off running.

-0-

"It's time to do a Patrol," Giles says, glancing at his watch.

Buffy stands up and starts grabbing weapons out of a big trunk.

"What exactly is that?" Sam asks.

"We look through the graveyard for nasty little things to kill. Want to come?" Buffy asks her.

"Sure, can I borrow some of those weapons?" Sam asks. At Buffy's nod she grabs a few things out of the trunk, and the two of them walk out of the room.

They walk in silence until almost the point where they have reached the first cemetery. Then Samantha gets a little bit maternal to a girl who reminds her more of Cassie than she is willing to admit.

"Do you kill people a lot?"

"They aren't people," Buffy says, but Sam can tell by the tone of her voice that she doesn't completely believe it. This girl is young, but she already knows the weight of a soldier's kill. More, perhaps, than anyone that Sam has ever known before.

"I guess the concept of vampire is kind of new to me, but do they…talk? Think?"

Buffy is silent for a bit before she admits, "Yeah."

"Do you ever think about how they have lives?" Sam asks, treading as lightly as she could.

"I'm dating one."

"Oh," Sam says in surprise.

"He is different though. He has a soul."

"Can you translate that into science for me?" Sam asks lightly.

"I don't know…he's not evil. He doesn't kill people for fun?" Buffy tries to explain.

"The whole idea of vampirism makes a certain amount of sense. It could just be a disease that is spread by bodily fluid," Sam observes.

"It's not though. The human body is invaded by a demon that controls them," Buffy explains.

"So, it's a parasite that is spread through the blood?" Sam tries.

Buffy sighs. "I don't know. You'll have to talk to Willow or something."

Just then a vampire comes out from behind a tree. Buffy stabs it through the heart, and Sam doesn't miss the tiny smile on her face as she does it.

She remembers when she was in the Gulf, there were colleagues who made that face when they dropped a bomb. She'd always thought they were monsters. She'd never said so though. Sometimes she had even made her face make a smile as she did it herself.

Just being a woman in the Air Force gets you called a wimp often enough that you don't have to add things onto to it. She couldn't appear weak.

Then when she'd killed the first person that she was face to face with. It wasn't a person of course; it was a Goa'uld, that is what she told herself, even though she had never been able to believe it as easily as this teenager did.

"Hail, Dorothy," Jack had said when she'd killed the Goa'uld with just her thoughts. Meanwhile she was just trying not to freak out at the death she'd caused.

A stake through the heart, and this child didn't even flinch.

Sam steps over to examine the dust.

"It's organic, Willow analyzed it. It's probably not much different than the ashes that would come from a crematory," Buffy says with an obviously bored voice.

None the less, Sam scoops up a bit to study. Buffy seams offended by this, so Sam shrugs, and offers a, "The United States Airforce has better equipment than a few high schoolers and a librarian."

-0-

Daniel opens his door preparing to get some water to make coffee out of. There are four Airman standing before it. He pushes his glasses up, and offers an polite, "Can I help you?"

"Your presence is requested in the conference room," one of them says. The others glares at him, clearly thinking that he is taking the coward's way out.

Another offers, "It's about your wife, sir."

Daniel takes off running. He is disappointed when he sees the conference room empty. He honestly expected to see her waiting for him. The general is in his office, and Daniel walks into the entry way. As soon as the General sees Daniel, he pulls the phone away from his ear and puts a hand over it so he can speak to the man.

"There is a space ship coming this way, and Sha're's voice was calling over the intercom."

"What did she say?" Daniel asks.

The General is obviously taken aback. This was not the first question that he had asked, and he wasn't really expecting it to be the first question out of the younger man either. "She was calling your name, and calling upon Ra for mercy."

Daniel's face looks absolutely devastated.

"What do we do?" the General presses as if he were an Airman asking his superior, or maybe a little boy asking his mother. He's used to making the hard decisions, the kind of decisions that people live and die on, but this is very different. This is the love of his friend's life, and he doesn't feel like he should be the one making this call.

Even though he obviously is.

"You have to save her!" Daniel exclaims.

"The last we heard she was taken over by a Goa'uld, and we know that they have played tricks like this before."

"She's here! On Earth! Worst case scenario, it is a trick, and after we capture her we put her in prison!"

"No, worst case scenario, she's pulling a kamikaze on us, and we all die, because we don't shut her down!" the General exclaims, concerned that the younger man has apparently not grasped how desperate the situation is.

"Sha're would never do that!"

"She might not be Sha're!"

"Well, a Goa'uld would never do that either! In case you haven't noticed, they tend to be a little bit full of themselves."

"Okay, well, we don't know anything about this ship. For all we know it could be full of bombs that she plans on dropping on us."

"That's a chance I am willing to take!" Daniel says.

"Your life is not the only one that would be at risk. You have to think about the rest of us," the General says.

"Let me talk to her," Daniel says.

The General's heart sinks. He should have known that that request was coming. "Son, Goa'uld are very tricky. I don't think that you are going to be able to tell if it's really her or not."

"That's not why I want to talk to her. If it is really Sha're inside of there she might listen to me. I might be able to get her to stop," Daniel insists desperately.

"That's not a bad idea, son," The General booms.

-0-

When you have a scent inside of you, it is much easier to follow it. Once you have tasted the blood of someone, you can smell them for miles and miles. This new scent, this new taste, was something even easier than normal for Spike to track.

He probably could have gone across the whole world for this scent if he had to. He didn't though. It's just wondering around the cemetery.

When he gets close enough for his eyes to see what his nose smelt he is disappointed. This smell is coming from a different women, and she is right next to the Slayer.

Not worth the risk.

-0-

"Sha're?" Daniel asks uncertainly into the speaker. He knows that these people said it was her, but he still can't quite believe it.

"Dan'el?" she asks with no small amount of panic in her voice.

"Is it really you?" he asks. He knows that it's a stupid question. He's not going to get a real answer.

"Yes, my Dan'el. I am coming to you."

"Okay, that's great. I can't wait to see you," he says, almost crying. "But you are scaring people around here. They think it is the demon within you that is flying toward us. You have to land. Land, and just wait outside of the ship, and we will come to you."

"Dan'el, I would never hurt you!" she says, and her voice sounds more than a little bit hurt.

"I know, but the demon within you would. Listen, Sha're. I am not in control of this place. If you don't do this they might hurt you with their weapons. I can't imagine losing you. Please, Sha're?" Daniel begs.

"Will you come for me, my Dan'el?" she asks.

"Of course," he says in awe. It was the simplest request she ever could have made.


	4. Chapter 4

The Goa'uld are a competitive species, so it should come as no surprise that they did not allow Amaunet to go to a new planet alone. However, it's not as if just anyone would follow her to a world. You have to be a little unique, and perhaps a bit crazy, to do it.

So it is Ba'al who makes his way through.

He took his time in the middle of the wormhole. Amaunet had gone through with her eyes closed to whatever horrors were inside the hellmouth. Ba'al, he went through with his arms open and he picked up a few hitchhikers on the way.

-0-

She followed his directions exactly. She is sitting in the grass staring at the sky.

"Sha're!" he exclaims, running toward her.

She stands, but does not advance toward him at first. "Husband, would I be permitted to move toward you?"

"Yes!" he exclaims, continuing the run. She needs no other prompting, and in a second they are flinging themselves at each other's arms. He picks her up, and swings her around and kisses her.

She pulls back from him.

"I'm sorry," he says, not sure why this action would have been offensive to her.

"Dan'el, it was not me. I can only master the demon for small amounts of time," she says.

"It is all right, we'll figure this out," he sooths her.

The General walks up behind them just then, and says in a soft voice, "Son?"

"Right, Sha're. I know that this is you. You proved that to me when you followed my directions, but…"

"You are not the leader of your planet," she says with understanding.

"I'm so sorry. They are going to have to put you in…" he tries to think of how to explain the handcuffs from her cultural background.

"They will have to leash me like an animal," she says, looking at the handcuffs and understanding in a second.

"I'm sorry," he repeats.

"I would demand it myself if you did not. I would not allow the demon within me to injure you," she says, holding her hands out before her. An airman slips the handcuffs on her.

"Can I kiss you again now?" Daniel asks.

-0-

As soon as Spike realizes that the girl in the graveyard is not the beauty that he bit a few hours ago, he works at picking up the scent of her again. As soon as he smells her, he can't believe that he made such a silly mistake. The smells could not be more different.

The girl in the graveyard smells fresh as a summer day. She smells like war, and airplane fluid, and sacrifice, and love.

The one in the house smells like the hell mouth, and fire, and outer space, and anger.

The only thing they have in common is the strange metallic taste that the blood leaves in his mouth.

So he heads to the house, because the other one can't be protected by the slayer, and she has to walk out of the house sometime, and then he will be able to sink his teeth into that sweet, sweet neck of hers.

-0-

Ba'al was a pretty young Goa'uld. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't have been so offended by the army that he had assembled. They weren't beautiful by any means, but they were strong. Ba'al couldn't remember the day when they had lived in Unas, and strength mattered more to them than beauty.

He didn't see them as demons. He would have talked about them as such of course, because that is the way you communicated with primitive people.

He knew what they were from a science point of view of course. They were just another species. Why should the whole universe be filled with nothing more than humans? Of course, all the planets that the Goa'uld had hijacked with their slaves had been inhabited before. The Goa'uld had just taken the creatures on this planet, and tossed them into a natural wormhole in such a way that it would be hard for them to get out.

Once in a while these creatures managed to crawl out of a hellmouth here or there, and get onto to terra firma again (although of course, they were not very likely to arrive at their planet of origin).

Why were the demons evil? Because they had been banished to hell for eons upon eons. They had lived, in most cases, their whole lives in a place somewhere between existence and non-existence. It was a nightmare, and when they escaped from the torment into the land of banishment, you can't blame them for being a little bit cranky.

-0-

It has been a long time since Vala had civilization. By the time she's finished her cuppa tea, she remembers why she doesn't usually like civilization. So she walks outside to get a breath of fresh air.

Spike wastes no time lunging toward her.

She fights him, because no one surprises a Space Pirate without being the worse for it. The noise makes Giles come out, and he joins in the fray, along with some medieval weapons.

"Give me a bite of that pretty little neck there, love," Spike pleads.

"Love?" Vala says with sarcasm.

"Yes, call me that as I bite you, it will make it all the sweeter," Spike shoots back.

"I suppose you'd like me to eat a nice lump of sugar before I let you sink your teeth into me as well. To make it all the sweeter?"

"It wouldn't hurt, love," Spike shoots back.

"Are you two flirting right now?" Giles asks in disgust. Then a second later he turns to Vala. "You do realize he's a vampire right?"

"This? This is what you mean when you say vampire? Well, he sure looks a lot better than the vampires that I have met," Vala says.

"Well, thank you dear," Spike grins.

"Not that you're really all that. If you wanted, I could do something with that train wreck of a hairstyle," Vala offers.

"Oh, I'd let you do whatever you want with me," Spike returns.

"Bold offer, you have no idea what sorts of things this mind can think up," Vala purrs.

"Clearly, this is no longer a battle for life and safety, but some sort of a mating ritual. As such, I am going to retreat into the house, unless I hear a scream," Giles mutters, walking off.

"You might not like what you see if you return for a scream," Vala purrs.

The two of them wrestle, and for a bit it seems as if this is no more than the mating ritual that Giles accused them of having. Then he sinks his teeth deep into her neck, and draws out once again the metallic blood from her veins.

Vala drops him to the ground, and grabs the stake that Giles had threatened the vampire with before he went inside.

"And we could have had so much fun together!" she bemoans as she tosses the stake.

He closes his eyes, because as much as he wants everyone to believe he is completely fearless, he knows that he is not. He is surprised to feel himself still alive after several seconds minutes have passed, and opens his eyes to see that the stake is stuck in the ground right next to him. The beautiful woman with the metal blood is gone.

He contemplates the options before him. Maybe she and he could have a bit of a fling if he could just keep his teeth out of her neck. He wouldn't be the first vampire to have a human girlfriend after all.

Then a more devious plan creeps into his head. The next time he ran into that woman he was going to convince her he was a safe little pussy cat. They would have a roll in the hay, and then he would drain her dry.

-0-

"Dan'el, are you being required to stay here as well?" Sha're asks.

"I am not going to leave you," he says, shocked that his wife would have suggested such a thing.

"I will not ask you to spend the rest of your life inside a prison cell because of what happened to me."

"Sha're, no place in the world would be a prison to me if you were in it," he says.

She leans against him. "I forgot how well you spoke, husband of mine."

"I promise you, you are not going to be here forever," he says, wrapping a protective hand around her.

"I missed you," she whispers.

"I know, and it's going to be okay. We're going to find a way to have our happily ever after. You'll see. Someday we will be an old couple, and the time that we spent apart will be no more to us than an unpleasant memory."

For the first time since Sha're was taken over by a demon, she actually believes there are going to be good things in her future.

-0-

Sam is a little bit nervous to call in the reinforcements. Of course, vampires are not the oddest thing that she has encountered since she joined the SGC. Still, Daniel was put in a mental institution for things that were happening. She'd had her own bad experience with things like this when she had said there was an invisible alien in her house.

She could imagine the cracks Colonel O'Neill would make about her not being able to take down time, and inventing some sort of an emergency to deal with it.

He wasn't completely wrong, the only reason she'd ended up in this mess was that off time had been way too boring for her.

Still, there was her duty, always before her, and she would do anything in order to do her duty. I mean, that was clear when you looked at her romantic life.

Duty, duty, duty, duty, and maybe a touch of Sam way at the end, if there was room.

Usually there wasn't.

So she puts in the call to General Hammond to explain everything she saw.

Including Sha're.

"We know. She flew a ship over here. Daniel got her to land it in a field, and she's in the brig right now."

Daniel had his wife back.

-0-

"I will kill you where you stand!" the deep voice of the alien who lives within his wife bellows.

"Well, actually I'm sitting so," Daniel says nervously to the monster while he gets himself near the door and calls "guard!"

"How dare you imprison your goddess!" the voice demands.

"Well, _you_ are not my goddess, and _she_ 's my wife. She decided to put herself in this prison, because she knew it would be the only way that we could be together."

"How ironic that the decision for you to be together is the one that leads to your death," she says as she advances toward him, and puts her hands around his neck.

-0-

"You know that creature is a soulless undead thing that would kill you for the fun of it?" Giles asks when Vala returns to the house.

"Yes, Dad," she quips, even though she is pretty sure that this man is younger than her, at least when you factor in the time she spent with a Goa'uld inside her, not aging.

"I'm just saying, you could have died. So was the flirtation worth it?" Giles asks.

Vala shrugs, "Flirting is always dangerous. It's also rather useful. Why, are you jealous?" she asks with a wink.

Giles almost shudders, and shakes his head, and buries himself back into a big book.

Books are useful, Vala knew. It was even more useful if you could get someone else to do the reading for you. Then you could get all that nice powerful knowledge, without the work.

"What's that about?" she asks, perching on the arm of his chair.

"I'm reading up on the demonology of Goa'uld's," he replies.

"Anything interesting?" she asks.

"Not as of yet," he replies.

She tries to engage the librarian a bit more, but when she gets nothing she sighs and goes away.


	5. Chapter 5

It's not unusual for Daniel to wake up to the beeping of machines that let him know he's in the infirmary. He doesn't remember why he was here exactly. Probably injured by a Goa'uld, or his own clumsiness, one of those was usually the cause.

Then it comes back to him with painful speed. Yes, he was injured by a Goa'uld, but not just a random one, one that wore his wife's face.

He grabs the arm of a nurse who is passing by. "I'm sorry, can you tell me what they did with Sha're?" Please, don't let them have done something permanent because of this. Please.

The poor nurse doesn't seem to understand his question.

"My wife?"

Her face still looks blank.

"The Goa'uld that hurt me?" he clarifies.

"They shot her with tranquilizers so they could get you out of there. You had already passed out from lack of oxygen."

"But she's okay?" he asks frantically.

The nurse nods, clearly thinking this man is crazy to be asking about the well-being of the monster that attacked him.

"Thank you," he says gratefully, allowing the woman to pass on.

-0-

Traveling through a Stargate always made you a little bit sick. If you were a Jaffa, you used meditation and selective breathing techniques to get through. It didn't really eliminate the problem, but it did ease the effects enough that you could fake your way through the rest of it by pretending to be really strong and powerful. If you were a Goa'uld, you had a certain genetic advantage.

If you were a human, you built technology to get you through, or copied the Jaffa, or just sucked it up and dealt with it.

Throwing up was really a small price to pay for intergalactic travel, when it was all said and done.

The gate system was a jet plane compared to travel through a natural wormhole. Even someone who was as familiar with wormhole travel as Ba'al found himself a little bit nauseous and exhausted when he'd finished the journey. Now though, after a few hours nap, and some strange food that only a planet as primitive as this would create, he was ready for business.

He stood before the creatures that he had pulled out of the hell mouth and said, "Well, it's time to take over the world!"

"This again?" one of them muttered with a bored voice. A voice which was silenced by a terrifying look from the man before him, a flash of the eyes, and the words, "I am your god. How dare you defy me?"

-0-

As the Scoobies and most of SG-1 (plus Janet and Vala but excluding Daniel, because he didn't want to be very far from his wife, even though he was not brave enough to go in there again) fill Buffy's living room. Probably in the history of the world, this much knowledge on aliens and the supernatural has never been gathered together in a room.

"So what are we dealing with here?" Jack asks, annoyed that Carter's curiosity has got him into a briefing during his off time. Honestly, she really needed to get a life.

Giles runs a finger down the text of a book, even though he is already quite familiar with it, as if to ask it's permission to spill it's secrets to the group gathered before him. "Well, it appears that what you've been calling aliens and what we have been calling supernatural beings are not very different at all."

"So, like you're telling me that vampires are just from another planet?" Xander asks in a tone of disbelief. That explanation is actually considerably _less_ odd than the one he's believed all this time, but it still takes him a while to adjust to it.

"Well, not exactly," Giles says, his brow knit. "It's a little bit confusing, and you have to keep in mind that these texts were not written by people well versed in science."

"The aliens that we deal with most of the time have little snakes in their head that control their brain," Jack offers.

Sam gives her commanding officer a glare. It's one thing when he plays stupid in the briefing room around his friends who all know that he really isn't dumb. It's another thing when he does it in a room full of people they are trying to explain the validity of science to.

"It's possible that some of the demons we encounter are created by parasites or other diseases," Giles admits, cleaning his glasses.

"Not all of them though," Buffy objects. "Because some of them look super weird!"

"That's true," Willow says, and Sam seams to accept the opinion of the Scooby's resident scientist, even though the high schooler isn't nearly scientific enough for her taste.

"I'd actually like to get a sample of vampire tissue," Janet says.

"Why?" Buffy asks, quirking up her nose in disgust.

"You think some sort of cure might be possible?" Giles asks.

"I won't know until I look at it, but…" Janet begins.

Jack cuts her off with a confident, "You wouldn't believe the things this woman has cured. If there is a way to do it you should know that she will."

Janet looks a little uneasy at the vote of confidence. She isn't really sure that she's going to be able to follow through on it.

"I could get Angel to do it," Buffy says softly.

Vala rolls her eyes. "Please, this society not only has an obsession with 'demons', but 'angels' too?"

"It's the name of her boyfriend," Xander says.

"A vampire," Sam says, remembering from the conversation they had earlier on patrol (you don't exactly forget when someone tells you that they are dating a vampire).

"Can you tell me more about the Goa'uld?" Giles asks, absently flipping the book in front of him closed and opening a nearby one to the reference of those creatures that it contains. The reference though has not changed since the last time he flipped it open. It is much too vague to be of any sort of use.

"I'm sorry, it's classified," Sam says with eyes just burning to spill it all out, but with her military demeaner keeping the rest of her in line. It's almost a pity that Daniel wasn't there. He no doubt would have let out several juicy tidbits before Jack was able to stop him.

"That's not fair. We just told you a bunch of things, and you're not telling us anything!" Xander objects.

"The book talks about a rebellion that happened a long time ago. Let by the people who created the first Slayer, and they managed to banish the demon Goa'uld and a whole lot of his followers from this planet."

Sam leans forward, this story sounding very familiar to what she knows happened long ago on the Egyptian desert. "Did they happen to name the thing that was banished?"

"Ra. But of course that's the name of an Egyptian deity, so it's probably not…" Giles begins, but he stops when he notices the change that his words have worked in the faces of the people before him. "You're telling me that Ra is real?"

"Now you know how I felt when I found out that vampires were real for the first time. Do you have a bit more sympathy for the shock now?" Buffy accuses.

Giles flips through the pages eagerly looking for something else. "The people who created the Slayer, they called, 'The Ancient Ones' and they were able to 'turn on' something that was already within the people who were activated."

"Ancients!" Sam exclaims, the scientist within her conquering cool solider exterior for once. "Sir! The Ancient Gene!"

"A gene, that actually makes sense. All of the potentials could share a recessive gene, and becoming a slayer just involves activating it. We already knew that being a potential tended to run in family lines." Willow observes.

"Wait, a gene given by the Ancients?" Jack says. Giles nods, not getting the significance. "Then, I might be one of these 'potentials' that you are talking about."

This revelation causes a giggle to come from several of the Scoobies. The military man shoots them a fast glare which silences them all and causes his second in command to giggle a bit at his cruelness.

"I'm sorry," Willow says. "It's just that Potentials are always girls."

"The same gene might be involved though," Sam offers.

"So you're telling me he's a carrier for Slayer?" Willow says.

"If I could get a blood sample from Buffy I could find out if they had the same gene that we call the Ancient gene," Janet offers.

"I don't think that is a good idea," Giles says quickly.

"Why not?" Buffy asks, looking at him in confusion.

"We don't know what is in your blood, and I don't think we should be too quick to hand it off to some government agency we know almost nothing about."

"I promise I would do nothing to harm her," Janet says more than a little offended by the accusation. "She actually reminds me a great deal of my daughter."

"Still, I have told you a lot of things, and you've given me nothing in return," the Watcher replies.

"We would love to share information with you as freely as you did with us, but we are not allowed. It's classified, and we would be breaking the law if we told you anything," Sam protests.

Jack speaks up then. "I might be able to tell you something that isn't classified." He points to the book. "Where did you get that from?"

"It sounds like you are still asking me for information," Giles replies.

"Right, sorry. In my line of work, I am much more familiar with receiving information than giving it. It's just that my Grandfather used to have that exact same book."

The whole room stares at him incredulously, but for various reason.

"Sir, there was a book in your family that mentioned the Goa'uld, and you're just thinking to bring it up now?" Sam asks.

"Well, it's not exactly like I read it. My parents knew that my Grandfather was into witchcraft, and my parents really didn't like me to be around his things."

"Witchcraft?" Giles says.

Jack nods, looking a little bit embarrassed on behalf of his family.

"And he had this book?" Giles asks, picking it up and walking it over to Jack. Jack nods again. "This is an incredibly rare manuscript. Absolutely none of them exist outside of the Watcher's Council."

"Whoa!" Willow says, completely awed by this revelation.

"What was your grandfather's name?" Giles asks.

"Miles O'Neill," Jack says.

"Yes, I've heard of him actually. He's rather famous among the Counsel. He doesn't happen to have more books like this, does he?" Giles asks with an eager look.

"He had a bunch. We sold most of them at a garage sale," Jack says a little alarmed by the gasp that comes out of Giles. "I still have some in my cabin."

"I would love to buy them from you," Giles says, leaning forward with excitement.

"Ah…I'll have them sent to you. I've been meaning to clean out the cabin for years now," Jack says with a shrug.

All of this time Buffy's mind has been fairly far back in the conversation. "So, if we can figure out the Slayer gene, it would become much easier to identify Potentials, wouldn't it? It would make sure that no one else ended up with the surprise I got when I became the Slayer."

"It would be a little hard to convince all of these people to take some sort of a test," Giles says lightly.

"Right," Buffy says, pouting. She's never really been the brains of the operation, and she almost scolds herself for trying.


	6. Chapter 6

"Isn't he a bit old for you?" Jack asks protectively standing between Buffy and Angel. "How old are you anyway?"

"272," the man replies, clearly not even slightly intimidated by the older military man.

Jack snorts, clearly not believing him.

"Sir, he is an entirely new species to us. We know that the Goa'uld have long lives. It would not be very surprising to find out that the stories about vampires living for a long time had a nugget of truth to them as well," Sam says, trying to pacify her commanding officer.

"Do they have a sarcophagus or something?" he asks.

"Actually, the Goa'uld would still live a long time without the help of a sarcophagus, obviously not as long but…" she says, ending her sentence in a shrug.

Jack now turns back to the vampire before him with added anger, "So you've lived for centuries, and you're choosing to date a teenage girl, because…."

Angel has never been intimidated by anyone, but the tone of righteous indignation in this man's voice is starting to have that effect on him now. Giles steps between them. "I know on the surface this relationship looks quite inappropriate, but I assure you, if there was anything in it that would harm the girl I would not allow it to continue."

"Let's forget for a second the fact that his hobbies include murder, and talk about how he's a creepy old man," Jack retorts.

"I would never do anything to hurt her," Angel protests.

"Forget it old man," Buffy says to Jack, "you don't have any say in what I do." She grabs Angel by the hand, drawing him over to Janet to have a sample of his cells taken. She extends her own arm to have them draw blood out of her.

"I don't think it is a good idea to do that so close to me," Angel says softly, "especially so soon after I drank from you."

"He _drank_ her blood? I am positive that whatever 'soul' thing he has going on is not enough! How could you possibly allow this relationship to continue? He's obviously a danger to her!" Jack demands in anger.

"There were extenuating circumstances," Giles defends.

None the less, Jack walks over and positions himself near enough to the vampire to protect the teenage girl if anything were to go wrong, as he absently fingers a stake he selected from Buffy's trunk.

-0-

Daniel knows that something has gone wrong, because no one will talk to him or even so much as make eye contact with him.

"Please tell me what is going on," he pleads to a nurse. He knows that she has a little crush on him, and he's not afraid to use this knowledge to his own advantage.

"Nothing," she says.

"I'm sure whatever it is is not as bad as I'm imagining, just tell me," he prompts again.

"I don't know about that," she says, checking his IV line and attempting to make a rapid exit from the room.

He grabs her arm and looks at her with baby blue eyes which prove to be her undoing. "Your wife!" she explains, breaking away from his light grasp and making her way to the door.

It is the panic in his voice when he says, "What about her?" that draws her back.

"She's escaped," the nurse admits.

"She made it out of the mountain?" Daniel asks in surprise.

The nurse nods her head.

"I assume she wasn't exactly Sha're when this happened."

"The Goa'uld has been in control ever since she hurt you, Sir," the nurse says with obvious apology in her voice.

"Did she hurt anyone?" Daniel asks.

"She knocked out two guards," the nurse says, her eyes involuntarily roaming to the part of the room the injured men were being kept in. "They are going to be fine though. Dr. Fraizer just wants to keep them long enough to be sure they don't have a concussion."

Daniel nods his head, and then stands up and begins to put his pants on underneath the hospital gown.

"Where are you going, Sir? Doctor Frazierr hasn't cleared you," the nurse says nervously.

"Yes, well, she's not exactly around to clear me, is she? I'm just going to go where she is. To get a clean bill of health," he says with sarcasm.

"I think you should get approval from the General before you do anything that dramatic," she warns.

"Hammond will come and stop me if he wants to," Daniel says.

"How about we share a ride," George says, entering the infirmary at just that moment.

"Sounds like a plan, Sir," Daniel says, smiling at him.

-0-

"So how does this virus normally spread?" Janet asks the vampire in the room. She still can't quite get her head around that concept.

"It's not a virus," he says. Not exactly the talkative type, she grumbles to herself. Although, now that she thinks about it, someone who doesn't breathe shouldn't be able to talk at all.

"Okay, well, how would you go about turning someone who isn't a vampire into a vampire?"

" _I_ wouldn't," he says, obviously offended.

"Well of course not. I didn't mean it as an insult. I just…" she pauses, sighs, and decides to start over. "If I am going to figure out a way to fight this, I am going to have to know exactly what we are dealing with. Human tissue is very unique, and it could take a lot of time to figure out what parts of this are unique because you are you, and what parts are unique because of the…" she almost said disease once again, but she stopped herself just in time, "what things are here because of your unique condition."

He nods his head. "You drink their blood, and then they have to drink yours."

"Curious. I'd heard the legend that way, but it never made sense to me. Is it necessary for you to drink from them? It could just be a sort of tradition that started because obviously, the vampire needed blood, and it wouldn't hurt the new vampire to lose some right before he turned, right?"

"I don't know. It's been a long time since I sired someone, and I never did it without drinking from them first."

Janet blinks in surprise at the word 'sired'. It smacks of tradition. A disease (well, she was going to call it that in her own head, and no one could stop her!) that spread by the bite of a vampire didn't make a whole lot of sense, but one that spread by consuming a vampire's blood…well, it wouldn't be the only disease in the world you could get by having contact with blood.

Maybe vampirism was some nasty AIDs-like virus that attacked the brain (and behavior) instead of the immune system.

"Would it be all right if I got a sample of your blood as well? I was operating under the assumption that you didn't have any. Which is of course ridiculous, because your tissue is alive. I'm not very good at separating the parts of vampires that are myths from the parts that are not."

Angel smiles faintly. "I guess none of us really are."

-0-

Sha're had the strange awakening that she had gotten used to since the beast took over her body. She would retreat into unconsciousness whenever things got bad, and sometimes the beast would send her there with some memory of an atrocity. Then, whenever the beast wanted her to wake up and witness a live atrocity she would do this strange thing which was very much like giving yourself a horrible stomachache.

She would feel like she was throwing up, but since she was never in control of the body she was just caught in mental dry heaves.

The beast had escaped her prison. She was now loose in this strange new world.

Her Dan'el would stop her. He always saved them.

He had left her, the beast informed her. The beast within her had hurt him, only a little, and he had left.

Sha're was all alone.

She should have known better. When she was with child he had told her that he did not blame her for all of the horrible things that had happened to her. He told her that he still loved her. But no one was really that good. He hated her for all of the horrible things that she had done.

Who wouldn't? She certainly hated herself.

-0-

"So what's the plan?" the demon nearest to Ba'al asks him.

"We are going to take over the world!" Ba'al says in his great god voice that usually causes those around him to become quite impressed.

"Right, but how?" another demon asks.

"We march through their cities and towns, and make all of the humans bow to us. The ones who refuse will be executed," Ba'al says. He's never been asked to come up with a plan before. This basic plan was always assumed and executed without him having to spell it out for them like they were a bunch of children.

Honestly, what he wouldn't do for a nice army of Jaffa about now.

"But there are only," the minion does a quick count, "twenty-two of us, and there are billions of people in the world."

Ba'al stops and stares at the demon before him. Maybe the natural wormhole didn't have as good a translation matrix as the Cha'pi, or maybe the language this guy spoke was too obscure for it, or maybe the man was an idiot. "You mean thousands?"

"No."

"Do you understand how big a billion is?" Ba'al continues.

"Do you understand that you might come off as a little condescending in proper contexts?" the demon replies.

"He's right about the population of the world," another chirps up, and several other demons note their assent.

"Well, then we will take over this town, rule it with an iron fist, and raise from it an army large enough to gradually expand our territory until the world is conquered," Ba'al says, quite proud of himself for having come up with a plan for the first time in his life.

"If you take over this town the army is going to step in and stop you," a demon points out.

"Who is in the army?" Ba'al asks, confused.

"What, you want a list of names? How small is the planet that you came from?"

"No, I don't want a list of names. I just want to know what sort of creatures are in the army," Ba'al says, rolling his eyes at how stupid these creatures were. Perhaps being in a natural wormhole lowered your intelligence. He hoped he hadn't been in there long enough to end up with any negative effects himself.

"Humans," the first demon replies.

"Well, mostly," the one next to him says. When the first demon glares at him he shrugs. "I've got a cousin in the navy."

"You're telling me that the humans of this planet fight?"

"Oh yeah," the demons agree.

"Who do they fight?"

"Mostly each other," the demon says. He's growing rather bored schooling this alien on Earth politics 101, and he would make an escape from the room if he thought he could do it without getting executed.

Ba'al can't believe what he is hearing. A planet full of more humans than all the planets he has visited in his entire life combined. It should be easy pickings. It should be the best day of his life, and then he finds out that the humans here are trained in battle.

Still, they are only humans.

"We go to battle tonight, to bring this world of weak humans to their knees!" he exclaims.

"Okay, boss, but I'm telling you, the people of Sunnydale are kind of used to people like you who think Apocalypses are easy. I'd feel a whole lot better about the whole thing if you had some sort of a prophecy or a magic charm to back you up," the first demon says.

"I don't know. Those things never seemed to do people much good before. Maybe this is just the approach we've been waiting for," the demon beside him declares.


	7. Chapter 7

It's the noise of a woman screaming that brings the Scoobies into the street. It's not an uncommon sound in Sunnydale, but it also doesn't usually mean that someone is crying wolf. When someone screams in Sunnydale they mean it.

There are four horribly disfigured demons in broad daylight surrounding the poor woman. The Scoobies jump into the fight undeterred.

"Humans, you will yield to my superior authority," Ba'al says.

"Yeah, not so much," Buffy says, going up to give him a kick in the torso. He catches her leg and holds it there awkwardly for a second before she pulls it away. His eyes glow, and he holds up his arm again.

"Another one!" Buffy says, ducking out of the way just in time.

"Giles, you were supposed to read and figure out how to beat these things, but no, you had to get distracted," she says sarcastically.

"I am your god. There is no way to defeat me," Ba'al says with a smarmy smile.

"How do you normally get rid of these things?" Xander asks the members of SG-1.

"Brute force. We tend to use big bombs. Got any of those around?" Jack asks.

"Not on hand. We had a bazooka once, but it was a little bit problematic to get," Xander explains.

"Guns at all?" Sam asks.

"Lots and lots of pointy sticks," Buffy replies, making another maneuver to avoid an energy blast.

"I suggest retreat," Jack says, grabbing the innocent bystander and retreating with her. Usually, he would protect the teenage girl instead of the grown woman, but he has already seen that this one can protect herself. At least from everything except maybe that ancient boyfriend of hers.

"You know he's just going to attack more people, Sir," Sam says as soon as everyone is safe.

"I know, Carter," he says with a terse voice.

"There is a Goa'uld on Earth, and a lot of people are going to die if we don't do something about it, Sir," she says, and the Scobbies get their first taste of the insubordinate way that she could manage that honorific.

"I am aware of the situation," he says with a terse voice, walking out of the room.

"Where are you going?" Daniel asks. He is brave enough to ask the question none of the others were willing to ask.

"I'm going to make a call. This is out of my pay grade," Jack grumbles.

-0-

Vala's eye catches on the pale headed vampire outside the window. She knows that she shouldn't go out there. This creature is dangerous, she's been told.

Still, danger makes her feel alive for a little bit. When the whole world is cold and dark to you, a little bit of life is all you really need.

-0-

You would think that a town as used to violence as Sunnydale would barely blink an eye when the military swooped in to save them from their constant danger. You would be wrong of course. They were used to monsters. Tanks, not so much.

"I'm not sure that this is going to be enough ordinance," Sam confides to her commanding officer. "The Goa'uld have overthrown a lot of armies before."

"None of them had tanks," Jack says, trying to make it look like he is not worried, but his face is fooling no one.

"What about Sha're?" Daniel demands. "They can go ahead and blow up this Goa'uld if they want, but I don't want them to blow up her."

"Wait, I thought his wife was one of those Goa'uld demons too," Buffy says.

"She is a Goa'uld, but she is also my wife. I know that there is a great deal of goodness inside of her, and I am not going to let them hurt her," he declares.

Jack can see that they are going to have a Tiananman's Square man standing in front of a tank deal here if he isn't careful. He would like to avoid it if he could, particularly since it's his best friend who would be putting himself at risk.

"We'll figure something out," Jack says carefully, firmly, making sure to catch Daniel's eyes. Daniel looks away quickly. It's a promise, sure, and he has no doubt that Jack will do what he can to try to keep the promise, but he made a promise just like that to Sha're and there was nothing that he could do to keep it. This might end up out of his friend's hands in much the same way.

"Sir, I may have found a way to protect against vampires being able to turn anyone else," Janet says rushing into the room breathless.

SG-1 is used to Janet's miracles so he listens easily. The Scobbie's resident scientist is a bit more skeptical. She may only be a high school student, but she had been looking into the properties of vampire blood for years, and had found nothing extraordinary about it.

"I modified the retrovirus that Nirti used to give the people of Cassie's village…" Janet pauses, not sure what word to use next. Two members of SG-1 find something to supply her with.

"Superpowers?" Jack asks.

"A deadly disease?" Sam suggests.

"Right," Janet says quickly, agreeing with both assessments. "Anyway, I was able to modify the genes in it slightly so they would produce an antibody to a rare protein that I found in the vampire blood."

"So it's all hypothetical," Willow says, a bit relieved that she is not quite as inept at science as it looked like she was for a minute or two.

"Not really. It caused the blood in my test tube to curdle. So I gave my vaccine to a few rats. Then I injected both them and other rats with the vampire blood, and only the ones who didn't get the vaccine show signs of developing vampire traits."

"So we know that it is the drinking of the vampire blood which causes it to spread," Sam says.

"We know that it's a disease," Giles adds, with even more awe. He had always assumed that the reports of a demon inside of a person were accurate. He'd seen some things in his day that seemed to confirm it.

"So are we ready to start passing this thing out?" Buffy asks eagerly. A vampire vaccine? If people could be safe from vampires, half of her work was done. She could put this scientist on a way to protect people from monsters, and maybe she could retire.

The last slayer.

She liked the sound of that, provided it didn't come with a side effect of the annihilation of the known universe.

"No, we are nowhere near that state. We have to make sure there are no bad effects on the rats first. Then of course, we'll have to get it approved which…"

"Will take a long time?" Willow suggests.

"Be completely impossible, because we'll never be able to explain what exactly the vaccine prevents _against_ ," Giles corrects, to the nodding of both Jack and Janet.

"We could use it on ourselves though, right? I mean being vamp prof would have some benefits," Buffy offers.

"I am not comfortable injecting a human with this before I do a _lot_ more testing," Janet proclaims.

"Okay, well whenever that testing gets done you should consider me your first volunteer," Buffy says.

"No," Jack and Giles object at the same time.

"Okay, geez," Buffy says, "I don't get what the big deal is."

"The big deal is you are a Slayer, and it might have a very different effect on you than it would on the rest of us," Giles points out.

"Confounding variables and what not," Willow adds with a nod of her head.

"I was thinking because she is a child, and we don't put children at risk," Jack says with an aggravated tone of voice.

"Right," Giles says, sounding ashamed of himself. He's not a parent like Jack is, and that accounts for some of his not being overprotective of Buffy. Most of it, though, comes from the fact that the girl has superpowers. She's rescued herself more times than he can count, not to mention the fact that she has rescued Giles himself more than once.

"I'm not a little kid," Buffy objects.

"The very fact that you are saying that proves that you are," Jack says.

"That is true in many cases, I am sure," Giles says with the diplomacy of a British person. "It is not in this one, however. She is genetically modified to be stronger than anything else. She fights superhuman creatures and wins." Giles says this with confidence that he doesn't feel. He knows better than any of them that when it comes to slayers there is always a day when they stop winning. Buffy has already lived longer than so many of the slayers that he knows about, and he fears the day that is before him, when he is going to have to press on without her.

"What kind of a sick person gives power like that to a child who should be safe at home, being, you know, a child?" Jack raves.

"The Ancients," Daniel responds, pushing the glasses up on his face. Even with all of the worry about his wife he's had since arriving in Sunnydale, he's had time to mine Giles's books for the most important bits of information.

Jack is a little taken aback. He is finding it a little bit hard to criticize the race that built the Stargates, even though they so clearly deserve it. "Why on Earth would they do something like that?"

"Well first of all Jack, they weren't exactly from Earth," Daniel points out, causing everyone to have an inward grown at his bad joke. "Second of all. They were dealing with people from a very different society than their own. In their time, a fourteen year old girl was already married and doing the work that she would be doing for the rest of her life. She was in her physical prime, and if there was ever a time in her life to fight off things that go bump in the night, it would be then."

"Okay, but thing aren't that way now!" Jack objects, looking around at the teenagers to make sure that none of Daniel's words corrupted them.

"Genes aren't quite that easy to revise, sir. I'm sure that they had the best intentions. It's just that the biology didn't evolve with the changing of society," Janet offers. "What I am curious about is how the gene gets turned on. I can't seem to find any natural way to do that. You said it happens whenever the pervious slayer dies?"

"Yes, I guess there is some room for magic in your world of science after all," Giles says a bit smugly.

Willow corrects him. "She's only had a day to look at the data. Besides, just because we can't explain it right now doesn't mean that someone isn't going to find an explanation for it one day."

"If you find a way to turn on the genes, maybe you should figure out some way to let these poor girls have a chance to grow up before they get activated," Jack says.

"Don't," Buffy says with the authority of a leader. It's a trait that is within her, deep down, but which she only calls upon when she has no other choice, "You don't want to let them get all comfortably settled into their jobs before they get the call of the Slayer. It's better this way."

The rest of them fall silent, being reminded for the first time in too long that Buffy carries a burden that none of the rest of them do. One that they would perhaps not handle quite so well as she does.


	8. Chapter 8

Ba'al isn't a coward, he tells himself. There is nothing cowardly about a strategic retreat. Unless of course you happen to be a Jaffa, and then you are going to pay for it with your life. For a god, continuing to draw breath for as many millennia as you are able is really the only goal there is, and you do whatever you have to do to make sure that happens.

Up to and including retreat.

Now, in the normal course of things, a god would have to make up some story to save face in front of his Jaffa. Perhaps he would have to execute an innocent man whom he blamed for the retreat.

Now, he didn't have any Jaffa, and the demons he had used in their place could be left behind. So, all that was left to him was a graceful exit into the natural wormhole, and a bit of clawing to get his way out on the other side.

-0-

When your host weeps within you there is no literal water involved, but it does feel like you are drowning. For a creature that is born to swim in the water, saying that you feel like you are drowning is saying something indeed.

"Shh," Amunet coos to the being within her, desperately trying to soothe it and shove it back inside. It's a sound that the woman makes to herself when she is really distressed. A sound this woman used to make to the child that she carried within her whenever it would churn with particular fierceness. The noise does nothing to calm the creature down.

Her host just seems to become angrier when the noise comes from her oppressor.

Her longing for this man she loves is stronger than anything Amaunet has felt herself. She is quite sure that it is stronger than anything she would ever feel if she were to live a thousand years.

"Then bring me to him," the voice inside her demands so strongly that she almost grabs control of the body by its very brain stem.

Amaunet knows that she cannot stay on this planet much longer, not if she has the faintest hope of keeping control, and she is not about to become a prisoner in her own body. So she makes her way over to the natural wormhole while she still has the ability to make her own way.

-0-

"General," Jack says, greeting Hammond with more fondness than formality.

"We seem to have gotten control of the area, but we seem to have a great deal of difficulty locating either one of the Goa'uld," the General reports.

"Several demons reported that the Goa'uld left the way that they came in," Buffy offers.

The General looks at the teenager, and desperately tries to see the supernatural warrior that he had been told she was. No matter how hard he tries, though, he can only see his own daughters when they were that age. "We're going to have to do something about that 'way'. We can't just have Goa'uld going and coming from Earth whenever they want."

"I think I might have something for that," Giles says, coming forward. "I found a spell in a rather old book. It seems to have some power to block the wormhole."

"You mean we won't have to deal with any new demons coming out?" Buffy says enthusiastically. That would turn the tide of the war in her favor. It would be another way to get her retirement and rest at last, and it might even be better than the other way that she had in mind.

"It seems like this charm only keeps the Goa'uld out. I am a little fuzzy on the particulars, but…" Giles begins.

"We can't rely on some magic charm from a book that is several hundred years old," Jack objects. "We've got to figure out some way to get this thing sealed up. We've got to bury it or something."

"It's not exactly a physical thing, you couldn't bury it," Giles points out.

"Besides, the whole idea of burying it came from people thousands of years ago. The Ancient Egyptians. Actually, there are a lot of primitive cultures that figured out ways to fight the Goa'uld, and many of them called those ways magic charms. I don't think that we should discount this so easily, Jack," Daniel says.

"I could show you the incantation," Giles offers, and the two them go off together to pore over old books.

"I'm going to go consult with the soldiers on how to manage the demons. They had some teleporting ones get away from them earlier, and if they don't get a handle on that we are going to be playing cat and mouse for months," Buffy says.

"I'll go help," Willow offers.

"They have big guns," Xander explains, following the girls toward the soldiers and their giant tanks.

"Sirs?" Carter asks looking after them. She's more than a little intrigued by the promise of big artillery.

"Go ahead, Carter, and take Teal'c with you. He's never really had the chance to see all the kinds of weapons Earth has to offer," Jack hiding a little grin.

That leaves Jack alone with his commanding officer.

"If you don't mind, Jack," the General says, "I think I am going to check in on whatever…" the General struggles to find a term to describe both of the two men who had just left together. Scientist doesn't quite seem to cover demonology somehow. Some days the General wasn't even sure it accurately covered what Daniel did, even though "social science head" was part of his job title.

"Egg heads?" Jack suggests.

"Right. I'd better look in on how the egg heads are doing. See if their plan is viable," the General says, excusing himself.

Jack is not the leader anymore (since the General arrived). So he is allowed to bask in his skepticism. He doesn't have to look into the practicality of a magic spell. He decides to go and hover over the teenagers. Just to make sure that none of the soldiers get any wise ideas.

-0-

When General Hammond enters Buffy's living room he is not surprised to see Daniel's head bobbing between two separate books. Every now and again, Daniel mutters a word or two, and Giles provides some explanation or an answer to some questions that the General isn't even sure are in English.

For the most part though, Giles's mind is free. "Would you like some tea?" Giles asks.

"No thank you," the General replies. There are only two people who could now get him to say yes to that question, his grandchildren. His daughters too, had always heard that question answered in the affirmative by him until they had grown up, and the tea had stopped being pretend.

"Brandy?" Giles asks.

The General knows that he shouldn't, being on duty. However, he is dealing with something called a 'hell-mouth'. "Yes, please."

"Samantha is a skilled warrior, isn't she?" Giles asks.

The General nods his head warily. It's bad enough that his second-in command has forbidden feelings for his friend's daughter, he isn't sure how he is going to react if this man has similar ones.

"Do you ever want to just stand between her and the danger?" Giles asks.

The General looks at him, both surprised and pleased by the turn the conversation is taking.

"I'm not sure if I'm sexist, or if it is more a matter of Buffy's age," Giles continues.

"Samantha may be close to your age, but to me, she is every bit as young as that teenager is to you," the General replies.

"I know, but at least she's grown up. I keep thinking that my need to protect Buffy is only because she's still a teenager. It's a natural thing to want to protect children, right?" Giles says, looking up hopefully. He's known for a long time that his feelings for the slayer were not quite what they should be. It is only recently that the rules were changed so that unmarried watchers could be in charge of a slayer. He had always assumed those rules were in place to protect against some romantic relationship, which never would have been a temptation for him. He longed for maturity when it came to romance, and there was no chance that he would fall for a teenaged girl.

Now he was beginning to wonder if the medieval monks hadn't been on to something when they made that rule. He was far more in danger of developing paternal feelings for his charge than he was in developing romantic ones.

"Grown up is a relative thing. Sixteen looks young to thirty in almost the same way that thirty looks young to fifty," the General says.

"So you still feel protective of Samantha?" Giles says, sounding a little bit disappointed. He was hoping that these feelings would fade with time, and that when his official duty with the slayer was done he would feel free enough to move on with his life.

"It's a bit complicated. I knew Sammy's father, and she used to play with my girls when they were all small. Besides, she's not the only one I feel protective over. Every time Daniel," the General looks in the direction of the younger man to make sure he is still busy with his books, "sneezes from those allergies of his I want to swoop him up and put him under a blanket until he is all better. I feel just as protective over Jack, and he's not even that much younger than me. I am even protective of Teal'c, who is older than me." Giles looks shocked at that revelation, surprising coming from someone who is used to ageless vampires. "To be honest," the general continues, "I think it has more to do with the leadership position than age or gender. It's a good thing, to feel protective toward those who have given their lives over into our hands by way of trust. I would maybe even go as far as to say a necessary thing."

Giles nods his head.

"How is your council run? You strike me as a man who doesn't get to spend a lot of time with other leaders," the General observes.

"I am not exactly popular in the Watcher's Council," Giles admits.

"Well, I'll leave you with my number in case you ever want to talk," the General says, digging about for a business card. The Air Force printed lots of them for him, and he had little use for them, because his work was so classified he rarely wanted people to know who he was, let alone how to reach him.

"Does it get easier? Sending people you are responsible for into danger?" Giles asks.

"No," the General says sadly with that longing for retirement that sometimes came over him sneaking up on him once again.

"I think Sam needs to look at this," Daniel says, carrying a very ancient and very heavy book off. "It sounds like there might be some science in it."

-0-

"So what exactly are we doing here?" Jack asks.

"We are sprinkling the magic juice around the hell mouth, to keep the nasty things from coming out of it," Xander explains.

Jack gives Sam a look which clearly demonstrates he expects an answer from her, and only from her.

"We are using the unique chemistry of this liquid to disperse the charge of the atoms which allows natural wormhole travel," Sam says.

"Oh, well why didn't you just say that then," Jack says with a shrug of his shoulders.

"You actually understood that?" Daniel whispers to his friend, clearly impressed.

"Sure I did. Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic," Jack replies.

"That's not what she said," Daniel points out.

"Sure it was," Jack says, staring straight forward at the 'hell mouth' and making no facial expression.

"It's not though…" Daniel says. Then he gives up arguing with his friend and turns to Giles. "Do you think that the magic words are strictly necessary?"

"I don't think we want to change anything from the protection spell," Giles replies.

"If it worked so well, why do we have to do it again?" Jack challenges.

"Well, the charge will build up again. It really should be done every couple of years," Sam explains.

"We plan on doing this every year on the anniversary," Willow promises.

"Even then it's just going to make it harder for things to come out of it, partially the 'two-souled ones'. It's still possible that we could deal with these things again."

"We'll set up a military guard," the general promises.

"That's sort of what we are," Buffy challenges him.

"With all due respect, little girl…" Jack begins, but he cuts off his words abruptly when he sees that they have not only got Buffy up in arms, but Sam as well.

"With all due respect _to you,_ that little thing would make mincemeat out of a couple of your men, so unless you plan on posting an entire army with their tanks in Sunnydale for the foreseeable future…" Xander begins.

"I can just see the public relations nightmare that would cause the president now," Jack mutters.

"Hold it, do you guys know the president?" Willow asks, impressed.

"A little," Sam gloats.

"The point is, you can't guard the hell mouth, and keep this whole thing a secret," Xander points out.

"We also can't leave the world undefended from this thing. Aliens just pop out of it and attack people!" Jack protests.

"You know there are other hell mouths in other parts of the world?" Buffy asks.

"What?" Jack says.

"This is the strongest one, and I'll pass on our little recipe to the Watcher's Council. They will take care of making sure that the other ones get the same blessing that we gave this one today," Giles says, trying to soothe the man before him.

"Well, we can't just leave this thing to be guarded by children. What if all hell breaks loose?" Jack looks around for someone to appreciate his play on words. Sam can usually be counted on to find him hilarious, even if she doesn't laugh aloud at his antics, but even she seems to think that this joke is in bad taste.

"We'll call you if we ever need the tanks to back us up," Xander promises.

"Sir, we can set up some electrical surveillance that could warn us, and the Scoobies, if anything went awry," Sam offers.

"General!" Jack objects, pulling reverse rank in a last-ditch effort to get his way.

"Jack, I think it's time to admit that we were a little out of our depth on this one. We'll let the experts take it from here," he says, smiling to Giles. Giles is a man who saves the world on a regular basis. The General can understand what it is like to lead all alone.

Jack looks at the man before him as if he has just grown another head. Sometimes George seems so familiar to him. He thinks that he understands the man completely, and then, then something like this happens, and he realizes that George is a complete mystery to him after all.

Still, the man can be trusted, even in his mystery.

"It better be a good camera, Carter," he says as he concedes defeat and wanders off grumpily.


End file.
